Surfers of the Apocalypse!

I found this jewel of a clip on YouTube.  I think it would make a great intro for a Cyberpunk 2020-rules game.

Potential Adventuring Party?

Surfers of the Apocalypse!

It's an overcast winter morning in Newport Beach, California, 2013.  You and a few buddies are out surfing, as you usually are at this hour, when the aliens invade.  I'm picturing like an apocalyptic survival game, somewhere between Point Break, Independence Day, and Attack the Block.  It's a sandbox so it's up to the players if they try to:

1. conduct guerilla warfare on the aliens
2. try to unite what remains of humanity for an all out counter attack
3. just try to survive
4. some other option I haven't thought of(as they always do...)

Some potential adventuring locales include:

• Sea World in San Diego, where the survivors of Camp Pendleton regrouped
• Survivalist Camp at Big Bear Lake
• Catalina Island
• JPL
• John Wayne Airport
• Remains of LA(maybe an NPC Zak Smith will be there, looking like Bruce Campbell, leading the resistance with an NPC Christian as a paranormal investigator)

In any case, I'd probably keep it short: 1-3 sessions. Maybe I'll run it on G+ sometime...

Anyway here's one last one to set the tone...

1e Anchorite

Border Princes' Archorite Career is a mystic ascetic hermit who lives in the badlands in a cave or on a rock.  Since Border Princes is a WFRP 2e product, here is a the Anchorite modified for WFRP 1e.

Career: Anchorite
Career Class: Ranger

Advances

Advances were pretty simple to calculate. 2e's +5% becomes +1 or +10% and 2e's 10% becomes +2 or +20%.  I also added advances in I and CL due to skills that don't exist in 1e(see Skills section below).

BS: +10%
S: +1
T: +2
I: +10%
AG: +20%
CL: +10%
WP: +20%
W: +2

Skills

• Concealment Rural
• Fish, Set Trap(instead of 2e Outdoor Survival)
• Scale Sheer Surface
• Silent Move Rural
• Flee!
• Hardy(instead of 2e Very Resilient)
• Immunity to Poison

Skills left out:

• Perception(No comparable skill in 1e, instead gave I: +10%),
• Rover(No comparable skill in 1e)
• Stout-Hearted(No comparable skill in 1e, instead gave Cl: +10%)

Trappings: None

Career Entries: None

Career Exits: Badlander, Mystic, Outlaw, Swamp Skimmer, Vagabond

Chandler on Escapism

So, with a Harboiled Detective Game on my mind, I started reading Raymond Chandler's 1950 essay "The Simple Art of Murder".  It's a good essay, and I recommend reading it in full, but I wanted to touch on one topic relevant to any gamer, that of Escapism.

At one point in the essay, Chandler responds to a fellow Crime Author who claims that Detective Fiction is inherently Low Art since it is "literature of escape" rather than "literature of expression":

In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers wrote: "It (the detective story) does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement." And she suggested somewhere else that this is because it is a "literature of escape" and not "a literature of expression." I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers. Other things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with. As for literature of expression and literature of escape, this is critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them from the three-toed sloth; he apparently–one can never be quite sure–is perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, and not even reading Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

Chandler argues that the desire to escape is part of being a "thinking being" and part of the "art of living".  But why is that?  Why should we relate to escapism as being more than just a base desire for entertainment?

Escapism as Redemptive Act

Chandler answers this question implicitly later in the essay when he talks about the thematic role the Hardboiled Hero has to play in the mind of the reader:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

Chandler sees the Detective Story as being in the tradition of the Classical Tragedy.  When reading the story of the Hardboiled Hero we are meant to feel Catharsis, in the Aristotelian sense.  He lives in a dirty world himself, a product of that world, yet a man of honor who is unrelenting in his search for truth.  And ultimately he is successful  though he may pay a steep price for that success.  In this way, the Detective Story is redemptive for the reader, reassuring him that his own strife is not in vain, that he too may flourish despite life's many downs.

Horror and Gaming: The Naive Victim Revisited

I recently played through a short Flash Horror game called URBEX.  You're an Urban Explorer who has come to these industrial ruins to photograph your friend's graffiti art.  Since it's a horror game, you find more than just the dilapidated old buildings you expected.

What URBEX really brought home for me, though is that creating Horror is not so much about WHAT you do, it's about HOW you do it.  It's a very minimalist game, yet it still manages to create that atmosphere of suspense.  To quote Lovecraft:

Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.

The Naive Victim

In an old post, I raised the question whether you can create the "Naive Victim" Horror Trope in a role-playing game, since the players tend to respond to anything suspicious with considerable caution.  In that post I suggested that one way to incorporate the Naive Victim is via NPCs, with the party running into previous victims or their remains.

URBEX takes a different approach.  By giving the PC a relatively mundane mission, to find and photograph Stinger's graffiti, the game turns you into a Naive Victim.  Even though you know it's a horror game, and you see strange shapes flitting through the shadows, the player can lie to himself and say "It will be OK." while you're pulling out your camera and clicking to photograph the graffiti.

So if I were to run a Horror scenario in one of my games, I would give the PCs a mundane mission to do, and try and keep the focus on that mission, while all the time dropping clues that all is not right.  Then, when the tension hits it's peak, and the party decides to run for it, they hear something pursuing them and find that the way they came in has been blocked!  Forget insanity points--I'll measure success my how many players wet themselves.

WFRP Empire Campaign Sessions 6, 7

Spoiler Warning

Session 6

Session 6 picked-up where Session 5 left off, with the party investigating an apparent group of cultists in Bogenhaffen.  It was another investigative session with the characters meeting with stonewalling and beurocracy at every corner.  At the end of the session, the DM summarized the following plot-points from the campaign: 

What the PC's think they know:

• Chased down a 3 legged goblin and found it's remains, and a demon, in the basement of Steinhager offices
• Met the thieves guild- Baumann is a very nice guy, deeply concerned for his friends etc…
• A cover-up- the goblin is said to have died in a warehouse (Steinhager) with a drunken guardsman and a flawed cover story
• Amadman is getting prophetic, haven't found him - yet!
• The moon is looking a little freaky…
• stiffed for $ and a nice stay at the inn
• Stonewalled at the town hall
• The secret temple has been stripped and locked up tight as a drum.

People the PC's have met:

• Magistrate Richter- said he would look into things- seemed concerned. When the PC's returned to speak with him, he was suddenly "ill"
• Dr. Malthusius- friendly fellow- not brave but has been helpful
• Gottri- dead dwarf- heart removed- a drunk that was seen being escorted away from the festival by a young man wearing the liery of the Teugen house.
• Tuegen has big canines… and is not very helpful.
• Councillor Magirius took them lunch- the order is a charitable organisation.
• Reiner Goertrin- Watch Captain- serious guy, doesn't believe a word of it…

 

Places the PC'sare aware of:

• The warehouse where the goblin DIDN’T die
• Steinhager's offices
• The Adel ring- all the rich houses are here
• Temple of Verena- large library
• Temple of Shallya- runs the soup kitchen
• Mourners' Guild- Karl Teugen died 2 years ago- purple skin, huge tongue…nasty. Died In 2 weeks flat.

Inter-Session Planning

Frustrated with the slow progress and out inability to charm or bully anyone into giving us the information we desire, us players made a plan for session 7.  Out intention was to eliminate the two likely cultist-leaders that we know about and try and force any remaining cultists to come out of hiding and confront us.  After much debate we came to the following plan: 

1. Tell DM we want to go to city hall and meet Steinheiger in his office. We want to try and join Ordo Septinarious.
2. Once in his office, we shut the door and declare him a demonologist and assassinate him
3. We then quietly make our way to Teugen the Vampire's office. We kill him and drive a stake through his heart and "Drugs" can sprinkle garlic all over it.(we might need some garlic to defeat it anyway)
4. We flee to the slums across the river(A) or the sewers or the thieves guild and lay low until the heat is off

Things didn't go entirely according to plan, but they went well.  I wonder if this is the key to running long-running mystery games: getting players to plan and talk between sessions.  This seems to solve the problem of slow sessions--if the planning is done between sessions, then the session itself can be spent putting the plan to action.
  

 Session 7

Anyway, so we immediately ran into the problem that Steinheiger would only meet us in his private office, so we'd have to move fast to reach city hall and get Teugen too.  Anyway, as for Steinheiger, we pulled it off quite well.  We didn't tell the DM that we intended to kill him until he had already said that we were alone in the room with him.  And it was a profitable assassination:

• We found a secret door by which to escape down to the sewer-level room where we defeated the demon in session 3.
• 1000GP
• An OD amulet
• A grimoire of spells
•  Various documents

 That said we did mess-up a few things:

1. Our attempts to cover-up the assassination were half-baked, so now we're on the lam
2. Our escape was too circuitous and by the time we made it to Town Hall to go after Teugen, the place was swarming with guards
3. Various clues we got later seemed to indicate that Teugen was the more dangerous cultist

Expanding on that last point:

• Analysis of the Grimoire seem to indicate that Steinheiger was a minor wizard--small stuff
• A note we found seems to indicate that Teugen is calling the shots
• The cultist council later met at Teugen's house, which seems to confirm this

Anyway, the biggest reveal was that the Demon Room was some sort of cult temple and that Teugen is preparing a replacement Temple somewhere.  Also that they have a ritual planned for the end of the Festival which they all plan to get rich from, though our research at the library suggests that everyone will just get eaten by Tzeentch.

And Councillor Magirious is supposed to meet one of the PCs in secret next session, so we'll see what comes of that(my money is that he turns-up dead beforehand).



 

On the New Cyberpunk

So, apparently there's a new Cyberpunk movie coming out, by the director of District 9 called Elysium:

The trailer reminds me a bit of the setting in Battle Angel with the Elite City in the sky, hovering above the slums.

With the release of Dredd in September, that's two Cyberpunk-themed Hollywood Blockbusters released in the past year.

In addition, there's the Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs computer games announced for later in the year.

Anyway, it looks to me like Cyberpunk might be making a bit of a comeback in the popular culture.  But is today's Cyberpunk the same as that of the 1980's?

Classic Cyberpunk Influences

The Cyberpunk of the 80's was born out of the well-known scepticism of Gen X.  William Gibson describes his disillusionment with popular Science Fiction tropes as being predictive of the future:

"after the Cuban missile crisis" he began to doubt both the "radioactive wasteland" and the Technological Utopias of H. G. Wells.

Gibson's Cyberpunk is definitely dystopian, but not in the way of classic post-apocalyptic fiction.  The protagonists generally lose, but they lose to corporations or general societal dysfunction, not due to their homeland being nuked.

Today's Cyberpunk Influences

Today's Cyberpunk comeback, and it's anti-corporate message, is largely influenced by the 2007 Financial Crisis and the huge amounts of taxpayer-funded bailouts given to floundering corporations(or at least the ones with the good lobbyists).  The popular feeling that Corporations have way too much influence on Government, ultimately resulted in the Tea Party and Occupy movements of recent years.

This distrust of Government and it's Corporate Sponsors has always been a major theme of Cyberpunk, as David Brin observes in The Transparent Society:

...a closer look [at cyberpunk authors] reveals that they nearly always portray future societies in which governments have become wimpy and pathetic ...Popular science fiction tales by Gibson, Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite.

Cyberpunk Heros

The most striking difference between the Cyberpunk of the 80's and that of today is the Heros.  While Gibson's heros generally meet an unpleasant end, the heros in the 4 titles above learn to thrive in their environments.  The reason for this difference is a result of the influences mentioned above.  Gibson's fiction was a warning of what was to come, based on a healthy level of scepticism.  The audience of today, on the other hand, feels that what was warned of has to a large degree come to pass--the Cyberpunk future is now and we must learn to deal with it.

Updated Death and Dismemberment Table

After a bit of playtesting, I realized that there are two problems with my Death & Dismemberment Table:

• The Horrific Demise happens too much
• The rolls 1-3 happen too rarely

Model to Validate the Problem

I suspected that there was a statistical reason for this, but I wasn't sure.  Here's a proof that is approximate, but shows clearly that there is a problem.  Note that I'm choosing assumptions that make this into a simple discreet problem:

1. Assume that when a character first drops to 0 or fewer HP then they usually end up in the 0HP to -9HP range
2. Assume that there is an equal chance of that number being 0HP,-1HP, -2HP,...-9HP(really it's probably weighted a bit towards the 0-end of the spectrum)
3. So for each potential number of HP, what are the chances of getting each entry in the table?

First let's calculate the chance of each roll value, given a specific number of HP:

• 0HP
• 1-10: 10% chance
• -1HP
• 1: 0% chance
• 2-9: 10% chance
• 10+: 20% chance
• -2HP
• 1-2: 0% chance
• 3-9: 10% chance
• 10+: 30% chance
• ...
• -9HP
• 10+: 100%

So given these assumptions, what is the total chance of each entry occurring for a given roll(add up the percentages above and divide by 10)?

• 1 Now You've Made Him Mad: 1%
• 2 That'll Leave a Scar: 2%
• 3 A Stunning Blow: 3%
• 4-5 Hit an Artery: 9%
• 6-7 Maiming Locational: 13%
• 8 Death Defying Stand: 8%
• 9 Killed Instantly: 9%
• 10+ Horrific Demise: 55%

The Solution

OK, so this model validates my intuitive claims that there are a lot of Horrific Demises and very few low rolls.  It also shows that limb loss, which I wanted for my pirate game, is pretty rare.  So now that we know we have a problem, how can we re-balance the table to get a more even spread?  I would suggest that we spread out the rolls more such that all entries in the table have two numbers.  Now let's recalculate the chances for each entry in the table as we did above:

• 0HP
• 1-10: 10% chance
• -1HP
• 2-11: 10% chance
• -2HP
• 3-12: 10% chance
• ...
• -9HP
• 10-14: 10% chance
• 15+: 50% chance

• 1-2 Now You've Made Him Mad: 3%
• 3-4 That'll Leave a Scar: 7%
• 5-6 A Stunning Blow: 11%
• 7-8 Hit an Artery: 15%
• 9-10 Maiming Locational: 19%
• 11-12 Death Defying Stand: 17%
• 13-14 Killed Instantly: 13%
• 10+ Horrific Demise: 15%

That's more the sort of distribution I was looking for.  So, for reference, here is the updated table:

Updated Death & Dismemberment Table

Upon taking damage which leaves a character with 0 or fewer HP, roll a d10 + the number of negative hitpoints the character has.

1-2 Now You've Made Him Mad: +1 to victim's strength bonus for remainder of fight
3-4 That'll Leave a Scar: gains or loses 1d3 CHR
5-6 A Stunning Blow: character is not killed, but falls unconscious for 1d10 rounds
7-8 Hit an Artery: Unconscious. Lose 1 HP per rounds until bandaged. If reaches -10 is dead
9-10 Maiming Locational Hit(see sub-table)
11-12 Death Defying Stand: lose 1HP per round, cannot be bandaged. When reaches -10 is dead.
13-14 Killed Instantly
15+ Horrific Demise: It's going to take a Resurrection spell to bring them back.

Maiming Locational Hit Sub-Table

For these, weapon type matters(heavy gun, slashing, piercing, small firearm, bludgeoning). Roll area of the body and then see the details below.

1 Right Leg
2 Left Leg
3-4 Right Arm
5-6 Left Arm
7-8 Torso
9-10 Head

Arms & Legs Details

• heavy gun/slashing- severs the limb for -1d6STR and for legs an additional -1d6DEX. Also see Hit an Artery.
• piercing/small firearm- lames the limb(due to nerve and other tissue damage). -1d3STR and for legs an additional -1d3DEX.  Also see Hit an Artery.
• bludgeoning- breaks the limb.  -1d3STR and for legs an additional -1d3DEX until break is set and heals.

Torso Details

• heavy gun- see Horrific Demise
• other weapons- see Hit an Artery

Head Details

• slashing- lose nose or ear(-1d3 CHR)
• piercing- lose eye(-1 to hit with missile weapons)
• small firearm- see Killed Instantly
• heavy gun- see Horrific Demise
• bludgeoning- see A Stunning Blow